#FCensor – Facebook Bleeding Red Ink of Censorship

Facebook has censored Fine Art Bourse’s (FAB) adverts for the online auction house’s relaunch sale of erotic art on the grounds of indecency. In 2015, FAB, then based in London, went into receivership shortly before its first sale after running out of funds due to a delay in building the technology required to run the cloud-based auctions. But the founder, Tim Goodman, formerly owner of Bonhams & Goodman and then Sotheby’s Australia under license, has now relaunched the firm in his native Australia, charging a 5% premium to both buyers and sellers and avoiding VAT, GST and sales tax on service charges by running auctions via a server in Hong Kong.

When Goodman attempted to run a series of adverts for his relaunch sale of Erotic, Fetish, & Queer Art & Objects on 12 September, Facebook barred the adverts citing its policy against “adverts that depict nudity” including “the use of nudity for artistic or educational purposes”.
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Remember to use #FCensor for all Facebook censorship. (#GCensor for Google censoring, #TCensor for Twitter censoring.)

Every act of censorship by Facebook and every person employed as a censor, is a splash of red ink on the books at Facebook. Red ink that has no profit center offset.

Facebook can and should erase the red ink of censorship from its books.

Provide users with effective self-help filtering, being able to “follow” filters created by others and empowering advertisers to filter the content in proximity to their ads (for an extra $fee), moves censoring cost (read Facebook red ink) onto users and advertisers, improving Facebook’s bottom line.

What sane investor would argue with that outcome?

Better and “following” filters would enable users to create their own custom echo chambers. Oh, yeah, that’s part of the problem isn’t it? Zuckerberg and his band of would-be messiahs want the power to decide what the public sees.

I’ll pass. How about you?

Investors! Use your stock and dollars to save all of us from a Zuckerberg view of the world. Thanks!